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This morning I found out that the Instagrate plugin I use to import my Instagram pictures in my Moblog category, adds an HTML comment with a link to their website in every single post they import. As you might understand, I wasn’t really pleased about that, so I tweeted:

This lead to a rather nice conversation with the developer of the plugin, who immediately pushed out a fix release that no longer adds this HTML comment to the posts. Minutes after, he pushed out another fix release that also removes the HTML comments for all posts it has ever imported.

Thank you Iain for being so kind and for the quick way you dealt with this issue. Instagrate is still the plugin I will recommend for importing Instagram pictures as blog posts.

The number one remark I heard when I launched WPupdatePHP, is that users shouldn’t be bothered with this. In an ideal world, this is true, but in reality this isn’t going to stand for long. Allow me to explain why:

The core WordPress team can’t get every single hosting company to comply. I admire their intentions, but in reality this is not going to help everybody.

At the time of this writing, PHP 5.4 is actually already nearing its EOL date and we’re still figuring out how to make PHP 5.2 and 5.3 platforms go away…

The end user is one of our most important, but underestimated, assets in this battle. They have the strongest voice in this all.

Last week, Gaya announced that he’s going to be leaving our company. He’s now looking for a new job. We’ve been working together for the past 9 months, so I’m sad to see him go. I do know that he’s making the right decision for himself though, so I’m obviously supporting this as much as I can. Are you looking for an experienced JavaScript developer? Go hire him!

This also means that we’re looking for a new frontend developer. You’ll be working with me on exciting projects like Naguro. You need to have really good JavaScript skills, as well as HTML and CSS/Sass of course. We love to automate things, continue to improve our workflow and do geeky stuff. Contact me, or tweet me if you are interested, or know someone who might be a good fit!

WordPress has PHP 5.2 as the minimum required PHP version. For a while now, PHP 5.4 has been listed as the recommended version. That’s a big step in the right direction, but I feel we can do more to help push the requirements forward.

At Radish Concepts we work with a lot of different platforms, frameworks and even languages. Most of our PHP projects are based on the Laravel framework, but we also do a lot of WordPress projects. When writing code for Laravel based projects, we obviously use namespaces and such, something we can’t do in publicly available WordPress plugins (since namespaces require PHP 5.3).

What we’d really love to do is be able to use namespaces for example, in our WordPress plugins as well. In addition to that, PHP 5.2 and 5.3 are really, really old. Even though lots of the Linux distributions tend to backport security fixes, it’s never a reassuring thought to read that PHP 5.2 has been unsupported for over 4 years now. We need to move on, as a community. Continue reading Time to update your PHP version

After much deliberation, I have decided to start publishing my screencasts in a separate YouTube channel, instead of in the same channel where I’m also publishing my vlogs. The reason is simple: I think these videos are very different in approach and have a different target audience (but there will be some overlap).

While my vlogs will usually be rather personal, the screencasts are more technical and in a tutorial format. I don’t think these different types of video go well in the same channel, so I’ve decided to split them up on YouTube. You can subscribe to one of them, or both if you want to see all my videos. In the near future, I’ll be opening a section for the screencasts, as I did for my vlogs already, so you can also keep track of everything via my website here. Continue reading A separate YouTube channel for my screencasts

For some reason, I just can’t keep doing it, but I really want to keep a journal. I want to keep track of things happening during the day. In 6 months time, I want to be able to look up what happened today. This is not just about day to day things, but also work related.

Tim Nash has published his predictions for the next year. The entire piece is worth a read, since I think Tim’s predictions are not far off, but the Bumping up PHP 5.2 part obviously sparked my interest:

[…] should we be aiding hosting companies, in supporting out of date potential security black holes. It’s clear that until hosting companies are forced to update they are not going to. So if WordPress was to change it’s minimum version number then hosting companies have no choice but to upgrade.

This is about the same as Anthony Ferrara has been telling us (also read his followup post: Being A Responsible Developer). I truly believe that the hosting companies are in a demand driven market. They will update their PHP versions as soon as large open source software projects like WordPress announce that they will bump their PHP version requirement for future releases.

If you like to read predictions for the new year (like I do), go read the full list of Tims predictions for 2015. As I said before, he’s not far off and I’m sure it will be a great inspiration for future projects or things to learn, like it was for me.

I think it’s time to start requiring PHP 5.4 in WordPress plugins. Even though WordPress still requires only PHP 5.2, I think it’s silly to keep telling people to run their websites on software that is no longer maintained for over four years now.

With plugins though, we can make up these requirements by ourselves, we don’t need to stick to the version that WordPress requires. In fact, I believe it’s going to make it easier for WordPress to move to PHP 5.4 and up as soon as more plugins already paved the road.

For todays video, I wanted to praise WordPress for what it does so well. It’s simply the best CMS out there. With over 21% of the entire internet being powered by WordPress, it’s hard to argue that this is not the most popular CMS out there.